Your view of IEPs, maybe because you’re in MA, is again distorted. Parents don’t use the IEP for math acceleration. That’s done in 6th and 8th grade tests as UCBalumnus pointed out. You don’t need an IEP to take Calc in 10th grade. IEPs are more for kids that need accommodations and other support, for whatever reasons.
“The speculation is that Einstein was on the autism spectrum.”
That could be, but what’s not speculation is that Einstein’s mental processing abilities were off the charts.
"and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms”).
Little unfair to bring in people like Littlewood, Ramanujan and Fenyman into a thread on high school math. The biography of Ramanujan is called The Man Who Knew Infinity, which is pretty much where he, Einstein, Littlewood are. That’s rarefied air.
I think the kids, or at least the parents, care about getting credit for the math classes they have taken, but it is oftentimes not possible to get credit and this is far better than retaking the class. Hopefully with the acceptance of online learning, courses like AoPS offers may become an option for many more kids.
One of my kids was in accelerated classes and took CTY Honors Geometry one summer in lieu of a full year of Geometry. He’s now in Multivariable Calc as a senior. While he hasn’t ever gotten straight A’s, moving quickly kept him interested and he’s now at the point where he sees beyond the calculations and understands math’s beauty. Taking Physics C at the same time, he’s able to utilize calculus to understand Physics and he sees how, essentially, math is behind pretty much everything.
Another kid, also accelerated, self studied pre-Calc one summer. She passed the placement test and moved into Calc AB but, in hindsight, that was a mistake. While she did fine in the class and took a further math class her senior year, she lost her confidence and actually started avoiding math when she got to college.
So, from my standpoint, the basics really matter. Acceleration with good teachers can be ideal for some kids. But, I would definitely recommend a structured course (such as CTY) for anyone trying to get ahead over the summer. While Khan Academy and similar programs can be great supplements, teacher feedback and support is essential to ensure the kid truly understands the fundamentals before moving on.
Yes, indeed they do. It was such an issue in ine town they held school committee meetings on it.
Might be a MA thing but the point is, parents will do what they can to get what their kids need. These towns were all very high SES. I’d imagine some parent ( lawyer) knew the legal ramifications of IEPs. I have friends whose kids have had IEPs and the schools do meet the terms in the document. I don’t think they can avoid it.
Some do, some don’t. My kids didn’t care at all and neither did we. As parents, we just wanted something to keep them engaged. Naturally, it depends in the circumstances. If something impacted our kids abilities to take the proper classes then credit may have been needed.
As it was, we were lucky. The kids were able to skip, test and prove foundational stuff to land in the right spots. If they stayed at public school, the path was more rigid.
A meta-comment: There’s an odd widespread belief that more math is inherently better. Of course, there’s also the issue that some kids simply aren’t as good at math,* so there’s the related but somewhat more nuanced idea that more math is inherently better for those who can handle it.
Even with the nuance, though, I (and, clearly, some others on this thread) question the assumption. But I want to know where it comes from: Why the idea that every student who can handle it should take calculus? I mean, algebra I can see (what is figuring out unit pricing while grocery shopping, if not simple algebra?), and maybe even trig, but why the insistence that math above that is absolutely desirable, and maybe even necessary?
(This has been triggered in my mind by someone in another thread assuming that placement into college algebra—a course that fulfills gen-ed requirements at nearly every single college out there—is placement into a remedial course. Basically, it’s an outgrowth of the idea that more math must be better, so if you’re college-bound, anything below calculus must be a deficiency. But it isn’t.)
* I realize there have been some claims otherwise upthread, but seriously, you try teaching a quantitative subfield to English majors for a couple decades and then we can talk about that.
A student majoring in humanities doesn’t need calculus, but anyone majoring in STEM or some field in social sciences does. Some students excel in math, some in English, and some in both. All students should be allowed to develop their natural skills to their full potentials. Anything less is suboptimal for each student and for the society as whole.
I love this thinking. I’ve got two kids - one is extremely good at math (probably gifted but never tested) and one that is competent but not nothing more. Why the pressure for my older son (now a junior taking pre-calculus) to do calculus when he isn’t going to pursue any type of STEM field in college? He is a fantastic writer and very strong in the humanities generally, but there is pressure to take the most accelerated/advanced math possible, even if it isn’t your thing, just to prove you are competitive for a selective (and I’m not talking T20 here) college.
I just feel like there is a lot of pressure on these kids whether it is societal, peer, parental or internal to keep taking the hardest math classes they can and I think that is where some of the “math fear” comes from for the accelerated kids. Obviously there are some very mathy kids who love it and don’t have any math fear, but there are some that are bright, intelligent kids who are swept along in this wave of math acceleration even though they may not be interested at all in it, but are just smart kids who can do the work even if they don’t enjoy it.
For example I’m pretty good with jigsaw puzzles and word searches and the like, but I don’t actually enjoy either one of them very much. There are plenty of kids out there who are pretty good at math, but they don’t actually like it very much. I think these are the kids who are nervous or have math fear.
My kid is bright, but not great at math. She’s adequate, but math is not her jam. She hates it with a white hot hate. She loves writing, though. Sounds a lot like your non-mathy kid, Thorsmom66.
This is far from a uniform belief. I doubt it’s even a common one among the US population as a whole. However, most HS students seem to attend a school system that supports math acceleration for a minority of students, and offers calculus for that minority of students who are accelerated in math. Many HSs strongly encourage students to take a math class all 4 years of HS, just like they encourage taking an English all 4 years. If you are +1 accelerated and take math all 4 years, then calculus is typically the 4th year class. Calculus may not be necessary for many of those students, but a similar statement could be made for several other classes taken during HS. Selection of HS classes is not limited to just the minimum that is necessary.
However, participants on this forum are not a good reflection of the US population as a whole. Some attend HSs where the majority students are accelerated in math, the majority of students take calculus (or higher level math) during HS, and GCs encourage students to do so. Highly selective private colleges also often encourage students to choose among the most rigorous classes offered at their HS, particularly if related to planned field of study. HS calculus may be expected among applicants to highly selective private colleges, particularly among prospective STEM majors.
Oh, I definitely agree that it (the idea that everyone who is remotely capable of it should take higher-level math) isn’t a uniform belief, but I would suggest that it’s pretty widespread. Maybe not among parents (aside from the sorts of parents that CC attracts🙃), but it’s pretty commonly held among high school educators, and very certainly among the folks who set national educational policy.
It may depend on what “higher-level math” is defined as. Specifically, is precalculus “higher-level math”? Precalculus would be the normal 12th grade math course for a student on the regular +0 math track, so a college-prep student taking math every year in high school would reach precalculus.
Now, some students get off the math track after algebra 2 or integrated math 3 and take AP statistics instead. Which is fine if they know that they will not need precalculus or calculus for their future college major, and are not targeting highly selective colleges that expect high levels of academic strength in all high school subjects (but not so fine if they think that the “AP” label on AP statistics makes it “better” for college admissions or college prep when they may need precalculus or calculus for their future college major). But is AP statistics “higher-level math” in this context?
The saying “quantity has a quality all its own” doesn’t apply to math. Building a solid foundation in math is much more important than a rush to learn calculus. Calculus courses were offered by few, if any, HSs in the US before 1980. They still aren’t offered by HSs in many countries that are considered to have done a better job in math education than the US.
However, high school math education back then was not necessarily that good. Colleges back then, as now, commonly offered precalculus math courses for students who took precalculus in high schools where such courses were of low quality.
The AP calculus exam apparently existed in the 1960s, so there was a non-zero number of high schools offering calculus back then.
Most students back then probably didn’t pay as much attention to, or spend as much time on, in HS because college admissions weren’t the reason to study calculus (or even pre-calculus).
What seems to have changed is, kids now take math to get into college rather than based on what they are likely to do. In my high school ( back in the 80’s), kids took courses based on their abilities. Only a handful of kids took calculus and most went into engineering or other similar fields. Another handful of kids took Pre-Calc. These classes were honors level only. There were no AP’s. Many kids took Alg II or Trig or both Senior year.
We’ve gotten to the point that kids are selecting their math path based on college rather than ability and interest. Naturally, many are stuck in classes they don’t like or feel stressed about keeping up.
Wouldn’t the same apply to other subjects like English, history and social studies, science, and foreign language?
Actually, hasn’t it always been the case for college-prep students that they had to take some amount of all of these subjects to be admissible to non-open-admission colleges? Of course, with more of the desired colleges’ admissions becoming more competitive these days, students now feel more pressure to exceed the minimum, or get to higher levels (e.g. AP/IB/college) to be more competitive, in all subjects.